Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn't - you will never understand.